Bartels, also a professor of politics and public affairs, is known as an expert in American electoral politics, public opinion and political accountability. He is the author of two award-winning books, "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age" (2008) and "Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice" (1988), as well as numerous scholarly articles, book chapters and essays. He also co-edited the volume "Campaign Reform: Insights and Evidence" in 2000, the result of a national task force that he chaired.

Bartels was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, established in 1999 in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In 2001, Bartels served as the nonpartisan member of the New Jersey Legislative Apportionment Commission and was a defendant in a major federal voting rights case, Page v. Bartels. Among his many honors, Bartels is a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Society for Political Methodology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bartels, who is now a faculty member at Vanderbilt University, is a graduate of Yale University and earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California-Berkeley. He taught at the University of Rochester before joining the Princeton faculty in 1991.